[Haskell-cafe] File path programme

[Simon Marlow]

On 25 January 2005 19:45, Duncan Coutts wrote:

> On Tue, 2005-01-25 at 19:12 +0000, Ben Rudiak-Gould wrote:
>> My concern here is that someone will actually use the library once it
>> ships, with the following consequences:
>> 
>>     1. Programs using the library will have predictable
>> (exploitable) bugs in pathname handling. 
>> 
>>     2. It will never be possible to change the current weird
>> behavior, because it might break legacy code. The System.FilePath
>> library will 
>> have to remain in GHC forever in its current form, enticing
>> programmers with its promise of easy pathname handling and then
>> cruelly breaking its contract. 
>> 
>> If no one uses it in production code then we can fix it at our
>> leisure, and having it out there with "experimental" status isn't
>> necessarily a bad thing in that case. It just feels like we're
>> playing a dangerous game. 
> 
> That's a sufficiently persuasive argument for me!
> 
> Could we just punt this library for this release. After all we can add
> libraries in a later point release (eg 6.4.1) you just can't change
> existing APIs.

We can't add libraries in a point release, because there's no way for
code to use conditional compilation to test the patchlevel version
number.

This seems to be a common misconception, probably brought about by the
fact that the time between major releases of GHC is getting quite long.
Perhaps I should stop writing email and get some work done :)

Cheers,
	Simon